


Deserved

by JohnMarston



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Undertale Genocide Route
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 19:12:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13507989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JohnMarston/pseuds/JohnMarston
Summary: Sans waits for the human in the last corridor. The human doesn't fight back.





	Deserved

**Author's Note:**

> sorry

Light spilled in through the windows, splashing the tiles golden orange. Rigid, faceless watchmen lined the corridor, casting sharp dark lines to divide the pools of color, pillars of marble older than anyone could remember. The air was still; smelling faintly stale, it sluggishly coiled and curled on unseen currents, gently sliding past the fuzzy loafers planted on the ground. 

Sans waited. Hands in his jacket, staring straight ahead, his stance as rigid and unmoving as any of the columns that dotted the room, he peered into the darkness that consumed the end of the hallway. Dust motes danced in the sunshine that streamed into the room. The atmosphere itself felt strangely pregnant, as if the room itself was waiting for something to break the oppressive silence.

An indeterminable amount of time passed. Seconds, minutes, hours; days. There was no way of knowing. It didn't matter. Nothing really did, anymore.

A scraping sound echoed down the hallway, bounced off the tiles, ricocheted off the glass and marble. A pause. Another. They continued, separated by seconds at first, but then gaining in speed until a comfortable rhythm had been reached.

A child emerged from the gloom. 

Sans' omnipresent grin tightened and grew strained. Slight creases appeared next to the edge of his eye-sockets.

The child shuffled forward, each step jerky and uncoordinated. Their head drooped low, unkempt bangs obscuring half their face, bouncing to and fro slightly with each shambling step. Their arms followed their head's example, hanging loosely at their side. In one hand they clutched a knife, points of light glinting off it as they alternated being cast in brilliant light to plunging into the shadow of a column; the other relaxed, bouncing into their hip with every step. 

All of them sparkled with dust.

It lay lightly on their hair, turning it an ashy grey. It crusted their face, filling laugh lines and eyelashes and the creases of their lips with gritty grains. Their fingers were positively covered, looking less a foreign substance and more a second skin, as if it was merely a part of who they were. It swirled behind them, unseen brushes sweeping lingering constellations in their wake. It slowed, left the turbulence of their passing behind, grew lazy. It fell, scattered, listlessly, to the ground.

The child stopped.

A beat. And, then,

“heya. you've been busy, huh?”

No response. He didn't expect any, really. He'd been watching them for a while now, ever since they crept out from the ruins, already trailing dust. They didn't speak, or react, or interact. They merely pressed on, relentless, indiscriminate, face an empty slate, lips twisting in words unspoken.

“so, i've got a question for ya. do you think even the worst person can change...? that everyone can be a good person, if they just try?”

Mouth, twisting. Not much else.

“hey, c'mon kid. throw me a bone here. you gotta be a better audience than that; it feels like i'm all on my bonesome here.” Sans winked.

Nothing. The child waited, still, the only indication that they still drew breath evident from the twitching of their lips.

He sighed. Might as well get it over with. He cast out a net of magic, snared their SOUL, and brought it out.

“it's a beautiful day outside. birds are singing, flowers are blooming... on days like these, kids like you...

**S h o u l d    b e    b u r n i n g    i n    h e l l.”**

Lift, slam. Bones skewer up from below and shatter the tiles, piece the child's SOUL, inject a healthy dose of KARMA.

The child continued to stand.

A wave of bones sent rocketing down the hall, twisting in a sine wave. Hit after direct hit, each one impacting with enough force to fracture marble and dent metal.

The child stood.

He reached deep and conjured up a misshapen hunk of bone and magic, held together only by sheer force of will. Skulls materialized on either side of the child; the hall filled with a monstrous cold, winds sharp enough to rend flesh from muscle and muscle from bone shrieked, and the child became no more than a silhouette as blinding light flashed once, twice, thrice, quice. With a sigh of satisfaction, Sans let go, the skulls evaporating into the air as he let his eye-sockets adjust to the light to survey his handiwork.

Still, the child stood.

Sans checked their stats. They had a lot of LOVE, sure, but that should've been enough to take the kid out. ATK 48, not that it mattered; it'd only take one hit to dust him anyway. He'd just have to play it smart. DF 14; again, pointless. KARMA didn't care about DF. 

HP, 7/92. Maybe he was getting soft in his age. Mental note: drink more milk. Good for the bones. Still, pretty close. At least they'd have to waste a turn to heal.

And yet, still, the child stood. They made no indication that they had even felt the flurry of attacks he'd sent their way, and, honestly? It miffed him a bit. He'd put a lot into those. The least they could do was act like it hurt.

“hey, buddy, pal. uh, dunno if you noticed, but- it's your turn.”

Silence.

“hello? earth to kid? demon? anomaly? forgive me if i don't know exactly what to call you, i never got your name on account of you being a mass murderer and all. no hard feelings, i hope.”

It was quiet enough that even while Sans spoke, he could hear the gentle rasp of the child's chapped lips rubbing against one another, the dust gritty, chafing the tender skin. He winced. Kid could definitely use some chapstick. Maybe once they're dead he'll give 'em a nice layer.

When he stopped speaking, the kid's mouth stopped too, and he had a hypothesis he wanted to test out. Digging into his jacket, he found what he needed and removed it with a flourish. Keeping a wary eye-socket on the form frozen in front of him, he nonetheless felt his grin widen a bit when a tinny *dink* bounced up to his earholes as the pin bounced across the floor.

“heh heh. always thought it was just a saying, but whaddaya know? you really can hear a pin drop. that's pretty good, eh kid?”

The scratching sound ceased. Sans sighed.

“welp. if we're gonna be stuck here, might as well make myself comfortable. you don't mind, do you? say somethin', anything if you do.” Silence. “glad we're on the same page.” Sans lowered himself to the ground, sitting cross-legged, ready to conjure up a tiny blue bone in front of the kid should they get any smart ideas. It might be cheating, but, well, they'd be impaling themselves. That's not on him.

Peering up at the kid, Sans studied them. For all he looked, he was finding it harder and harder to reconcile two conflicting ideas. For one, the kid was very much alive. Sure, 7/92 HP wasn't exactly top marks in health, but it was a great deal better than the ol' goose egg. But visually... there was no gentle rise and fall of their chest; their eyes were still shrouded behind their bangs, but there was no subtle twinging of facial muscles he'd expect to see for each blink. He winced again. Maybe add buying some eye-drops to his to-do list; 1) kill kid, 2) pretty up the body. But as far as he could tell, the kid would be a natural at red-light/green-light, given that they could be persuaded to actually move when green-light came around.

The only motion came from stray strands of hair twisting in unseen air currents and, occasionally, their mouth. He'd been watching them from afar for most of their trip through the underground and still couldn't make heads or tails of it. At first, he thought they were talking to themselves, but there was no such motion when they were alone. Once all the monsters in a region had either been slaughtered or fled, the child continued forward, face motionless, weapon swinging at their side. Their lips only moved when they were aware someone was observing them. Was it an attempt at communication? Was it a prayer, for those they were about to cut down? Was it –

wait.

He was here, right now. But the child? No movement.

“kid? –” movement. Short, sweet, to the point. One syllable. One word.

“aw, geeze, kid –” three motions this time, chapped slabs of dead meat scraping against one another in short, staccato rhythm.

“that's the secret? you're just copying whatever you hear?” more movement, imitating his words. “i gotta say, that doesn't really help me much –”

Unless – check the timing.

“six sticky skeletons, six sticky skeletons, six sticky skeletons –”

Right on cue, the child's lips moved with his own.

He went faster.

“we indexed the quantum state vectors in a hilbert space, injected the particles into the booster synchrotron to one hundred megavolts per nucleon – aww, shit.”

They weren't echoing what he was saying. They were saying it simultaneously, in perfect sync. 

They knew what he was going to say before he did.

A flash of movement. The dagger flew from their hand, straight as an arrow, and Sans flinched and teleported to the side before he realized it wasn't directed at him.

One of the windows shattered. A breeze drifted in as the pressure equalized. The bangs hanging in front of the child's eyes shifted, parted, exposed that which had been hidden from view until now.

Sans stared into those flat, unflinching eyes and saw time. Years, millennia, eons. Endless. It was written in the fathomless black of the pupils, in the hazel of the iris, in the sharp red of the veins that contrasted the sour milk yellow-white of the cornea, in the great sense of inevitability and weight that showed itself in a long, slow blink. It was all that and more. It stretched on, on, on and on, beyond that, looping continually over and over into a great infinite.

A chill ran down his spine. He just couldn't understand.

“why? for what purpose, why would you – why?”

They stood in silence. Then, slowly, as if struggling to remember how, they spoke, words grating out of their throat with terrifying finality.

“You were right. Kids like me... burning in hell.”

“It's what I deserve.”

“... your turn.”

Sans felt those years weighing down on him, incomprehensible, immeasurable, smothering him in the sheer vastness of eternity. They pressed down and squeezed out any lingering hope he might have had left, leaving him as empty as the walking corpse before him. He squeezed his eye-sockets shut and conjured a bone, shooting it straight through the SOUL suspended in front of him. The world swam; his head filled with inane ramblings, trying to process the unthinkable. He heard a thump, and then a shattering, tinkling, as that of a bottle being broken. He opened his eyes to stare into those of the child as the fragments of their SOUL bounced along the ground, hoping against hope to see a sparkle fade, a light blink off, something.

There was no change in those eyes. Just death.

Sans fell down.

  


  


Light spilled in through the windows, splashing the tiles golden orange. Rigid, faceless watchmen lined the corridor, casting sharp dark lines to divide the pools of color, pillars of marble older than anyone could remember. The air was still; smelling faintly stale, it sluggishly coiled and curled on unseen currents, gently sliding past the fuzzy loafers planted on the ground. 

Sans waited. Hands in his jacket, staring straight ahead, his stance as rigid and unmoving as any of the columns that dotted the room, he peered into the darkness that consumed the end of the hallway. Dust motes danced in the sunshine that streamed into the room. The atmosphere itself felt strangely pregnant, as if the room itself was waiting for something to break the oppressive silence.

An indeterminable amount of time passed. Seconds, minutes, hours; days. There was no way of knowing. It didn't matter. Nothing really did, anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> _me: oh boy I sure do love happy endings and redemption_   
>  _me to me: write this_
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> for real I hate this, please don't ever do this again brain please n ty
> 
> dunno if it's Frisk or Chara or both. your guess is as good as, if not better, than mine. tagged both cuz idk.
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> wasn't sure how to clarify exactly what the child is doing- resetting or loading at the beginning of the corridor. when I first had the idea, it was of them constantly loading the fight over and over just to let themselves be killed- suffer physically, but it might be more painful for them to go through the whole underground over and over so they suffer emotionally too, so, again. no idea. 
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> sans' technobabble was literally me googling “theoretical physics” and lifting phrases from wikipedia so if you actually know what that stuff means I'm sorry for butchering it.
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> misc. inspiration – the jaunt (stephen king), doctor who – midnight (s4 ep10)
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> again, no one else proof-read or anything so I'm sure there's bunches of errors. feel free to let me know what's busted, or if you have any thoughts or anything. I wish I could more easily convey the weight of time the child has in their eyes but I'm not quite at Loveraft's level unfortunately
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> ugh went back after re-reading and changed some words at the end. repeated some too often. that's what you get when you rush I guess


End file.
